Solo show
Opening
Thursday 19 September 2024
Following the “Anatomie d’un paysage” exhibition presented in Brussels at the end of 2023, Galerie La Forest Divonne is presenting Valérie Novello’s first solo exhibition in its Paris space from 19 September to 30 October 2024.
The exhibition invites visitors to journey through fragments of Valérie Novello’s landscapes. Primarily graphic, her work extends to the limits of drawing and sculpture, combining drawing and bas-relief techniques in her treatment of paper, and pushing the territory of drawing into the realms of glass, wax and plaster, in works that are often monumental.
His playground is infinite. Through a series of recent works in paper, wax and plaster, she explores nature and her poetic memory of it. She uses recurring symbols such as trees, animals and organic motifs to evoke feelings of nostalgia and reflection. Using a variety of materials (Japanese paper, bread, wax, plaster), she seeks to reconstitute the link between the known and the unknown, and to conjure up new perceptions through her imagination. Her works exude all the power of inhabited spaces, and a desire never to leave them.
Valérie Novello’s work bears the hallmark of the greatest creators: the need to explore, to continue to express herself differently, but always more powerfully and, above all, accurately. In fact, she describes herself as an “artist-archaeologist”. Truly unclassifiable, her work is constructed like an archaeology of memory. “If not everything can be explained, if not everything can be reached, I try to give shape to a mental image – distant and original – that obsesses me. I seek to approach it, to unveil it and reveal it in the present. All that remains of this original image are incomplete, broken up and fragmented”, she writes.
To coincide with the exhibition, Galerie La Forest Divonne is publishing a catalogue with a text by Alexandra Swenden, curator and artistic director.
